Acute and chronic infections of plants, animals and man, caused by various viral pathogens, represent a serious medical and economic problem. In fact, presumably 60% of the diseases occurring in the industrialized countries are caused by viruses. Thus, diseases caused by hepatitis viruses, for example, are counted among the most frequent infections world-wide. Since said viral infections substantially affect the liver, the progressive destruction of this organ, followed by a subsequent development of a cirrhosis, may finally result in the formation of a hepatocellular carcinoma.
A high specificity degree for the viral pathogen and the simultaneous absence or minimization of health-damaging side-effects have to be regarded as an essential demand to be made on an antiviral therapeutic agent. In this connection, the close linkage of the viral reproductive cycle with the metabolic and replicative functions of the host cell prove to be especially problematic. For the time being, medical research focuses on the development of antiviral agents which impair or prevent the replication of the viral genome, great importance being attached particularly to chemically synthesized nucleoside analogues.
However, one of the main problems of antiviral chemotherapy has to be seen in the fact that no effective substances for therapeutic treatment are available for plurality of significant infective agents such as the hepatitis B virus, for example.
Correspondingly, the present invention is based on the technical problem of providing further therapeutically active and simultaneously pharmaceutically compatible substances for controlling viral diseases.
The solution to this technical is achieved by providing the embodiments characterized in more detail in the claims. In particular, the technical problem is solved in that the present invention discloses the therapeutically active use of thiol compounds for the preparation of a pharmaceutical composition for controlling virus-induced diseases, disulfide bridges present in viral proteins being destroyed by the thiol compounds.